The author is a Forbes contributor. The opinions expressed are those of the writer.

Loading ...

Loading ...

This story appears in the {{article.article.magazine.pretty_date}} issue of {{article.article.magazine.pubName}}. Subscribe

Continued from page 2

In order to avoid the well-worn flags waved against the gender paygap (like this bombast, for example on our own site), AAUW's report looked at 15,000 young men and women one year out of college with equivalent backgrounds and experience. The average age was 23, all were employed full time and none had children. “It was important to take an apples-to-apples approach,” Hill says, “and to control for as many variables as possible.”

Across the entire group women were earning 82 cents to the dollar, but AAUW then set about controlling for the factors most commonly used to denounce the paygap. “A lot of the factors involve choice,” Hill says. “That women choose different college majors, they choose to enter different fields upon graduation and they choose to work fewer hours.” By removing these “choice” variables the study found that an unexplained gender pay gap persisted. Among men and women with the same major and comparable jobs working the same number of hours each week, women’s pay still lags behind men’s by 7% (or 93 cents to the dollar).

That 7%, says Hill, “Suggests that discrimination continues to be a part of the problem in the workforce.” Increasing numbers of claims filed with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the millions of dollars employers pay annually in awards, settlements, and other legal fees only underscore that hypothesis.

“Detractors will say that 7% is a small amount,” Maatz says, hinting that she knows no research will put the gender pay gap debate to rest. “But compounded over lifetime earnings it’s considerable. I think it’s interesting that anyone would want to minimize this problem. You can’t get around the numbers. One year out of college women are earning less than men and paying more of their salary towards student loans which makes them less likely to contribute to pensions and retirement plans and headed towards a lifetime at a financial disadvantage.”

I’d take it one step further for those naysayers—but more importantly the legislators—who don’t seem to see equal pay for men and women as a critical issue: with a generation of women graduating college and entering the workforce on the path towards poverty (and women graduating at record rates), we could be confronted with more and more women becoming a burden on national relief programs in the long term. Politicians don’t care if Catilin earns as much as her brother Mike? Hope they’re prepared to pay for her food, heat and healthcare when she goes broke in her seventies.

No, it seems this is research with no silver lining. Women’s career experts, frustrated with the “choice” dilemma of the pay gap, often chide women on the subject of negotiation (women negotiate poorly and so don’t earn as much), but Maatz and Hill don’t see that as a panacea. “Encouraging women to negotiate forcefully isn’t the answer,” Maatz says. “We all know what aggressive women are called, which makes that a solution that’s fraught with peril.”

Instead, she agrees that enforcement in equal pay is the only solution, and being a policy expert says the only hope is that it starts on the federal level. “What we need is policy with much stronger penalties against employers that are found to discriminate on pay,” she says. “It’s impossible to police every company but we need laws with enough teeth that they’d rather comply then worry about being caught and punished.”

Unfortunately we’re no closer to such laws than we were when the Equal Pay Act passed in 1963 (and is considered among equal rights activists to be little more than a light slap on the hands for offending employers). The Paycheck Fairness Act, which would have required employers to prove that any salary differences between men and women doing the same work were not gender-related, failed in June. The final vote was 52-47, with all Republicans opposing the bill. That included female Senators Kelly Ayotte (N.H.), Susan Collins (Maine), Kay Bailey Hutchison (Texas), Lisa Murkowski (Alaska) and Olympia Snowe (Maine).

Who, presumably, have all paid off their student loans. Let’s hope their daughters have the same remarkable luck.